Valve: no plans to bring Steam to Linux

Valve says that it is not working on a Linux port of the Steam content …

Close scrutiny of the Steam port for Mac OS X led to the discovery of evidence which suggested that a Linux version might be coming soon. Sadly, Valve marketing vice president Doug Lombardi dispelled these suspicions in a recent interview during which he confirmed that the company is not actively working on Steam for Linux.

Steam is a popular digital content delivery channel for computer games. It allows users to purchase and download games from a wide range of mainstream vendors. The service is developed and operated by Valve, the company behind Half-Life, Portal, and a number of other well-known games. Steam was originally only available for the Windows platform, but Valve officially launched a Mac OS X version earlier this year.

Linux hardware news site Phoronix discovered that a shell script in the Mac OS X version of Steam includes a conditional expression that checks to see if the user is running Linux. There are also some strings that refer to Linux in several of Steam's binary components. These bits of evidence strongly indicate that Valve has at least experimented internally with a Linux port of Steam.

It's possible that the company began evaluating Linux portability and decided that there wasn't enough business value in pursuing it to completion. The total number of desktop Linux users is a considerably smaller audience than Mac OS X and Windows. It's also worth noting that a big chunk of Linux desktop installations are probably never going to be used for gaming (netbooks that don't have sufficient hardware capabilities, university computer labs, free software enthusiasts who are ideologically disinclined to purchase proprietary software).

Despite the fact that the number of Linux users who are interested in buying games is relatively small, there is a lot of evidence that members of this demographic are eager to open up their wallets to vendors who support gaming on the Linux platform. This group of gamers is going to be disappointed by Valve's decision.

It's correct that the MacOS versions run as OpenGL, but there are tons of issues to work out with a Linux port, including GPU drivers and the giant colossal clusterfuck that is the state of Linux sound APIs.

Keep in mind Steam is only the delivery system. In order for any games to be available, they too must be ported to Linux.

So while Linux users may be yearning for games, if there aren't many now, there won't be many if/when Steam went live.

This is true but it could also lead to more developers deciding that they should port, since there is a well know distributor available. But then again who knows if they will think like that. I may just be applying my wishy thinking in hopes that spacestar ordering will help out.

While Windows and Mac OS X present a rather homogeneous environment to publish games on, the same can not be said for Linux. Just look at the number of distributions, not to mention the myriad variations within a single distro. I don't see many developers porting AAA titles to Linux until that's addressed.

As much as I would loved playing my Steam games in Linux, should they have actually done the port, I am not really surprised. Linux is such a niche market that no one wants to cater to it, and no one wants to use it because no one caters to it. It's a catch-22.

I do like Linux for its speed, efficiency and ease of use when I'm trying to do something without Windows "helping" me. I would use Linux as my primary OS if Steam was on there, but oh well. Like I said, it's not a surprise at all.

It was something of a shock that they even ported it to Mac. No surprise they don't want to throw resources at porting it to a platform that has a fraction of the Macintosh market.

Well, with Mac OS you have an even more console-like setup with a much smaller hardware set. I'm assuming that someone's cost/benefit analysis has found that there are finally enough people with powerful enough Macs to make it worth the effort in porting. From a hardware perspective it's probably simpler but the effort of porting everything would only be worth it if the money was there.

With Linux you have the hardware variety of the Windows market combined with much more (OS) software variety than either Windows or MacOS. On top of that, the numbers are probably not big enough to make the effort worth it in the long run. If it's twice as hard to port and test yet will only gain a small sliver of business, then it doesn't make good sense.

If they had plans for Linux (or if they still do) it wouldn't be for Linux desktops, it would be for future smartphones/STBs etc. They may just be preparing for the eventuality of Linux based hardware that has the graphics capability, plus the consumer mindset (versus the variety of mindsets that run Linux on PC hardware, of which only a fraction would be interested in commercial games, as noted)

I would have been happy to only have ports of older games using DOSBox (not much work needed there) or point'n'click adventure games. The latter one especially - a netbook running a lean Linux distro would be perfect for playing those.

The sad thing is that the market of gamers using Linux is small now but would likely grow significantly IF Steam and its main titles were ported over to it. As others have said, it's a Catch-22, but I believe Valve are in a position to sway that situation to their favour if they were to invest in it.

The people above made some very good points about why this isn't a good option for Valve or gamers. While some Linux users might be put off by this, those people must at least admit that there are some extremely valid reasons why the pursuit of such a thing doesn't make much sense for Valve. Glad there was clarification on this issue though.

Keep in mind Steam is only the delivery system. In order for any games to be available, they too must be ported to Linux.

So while Linux users may be yearning for games, if there aren't many now, there won't be many if/when Steam went live.

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but does Steam for Mac run the games in a form of OpenGL that's compatable with Linux?

Nope, Steam has very little to do with how your game runs. However, most Valve games including the Orange Box run very well under Wine on Linux.

Well, they DO implement some things to make games run, like wrapping games in DOSBOX for instance (XCOM, anyone?). I'm sure plenty of their steam games would run just fine if they took the same amount of time to include some sort of opensource wrapper like they do with many of their games on windows/Mac.

I personally believe it to be a big joke when people talk of fragmentation in Linux, in terms of libraries available. That argument is further made moot when they have dependency install checks.

There are also prime time applications that are ported to all main operating systems (and they work on almost every distro), why couldn't games be easily ported? I mean mySQL, Apache, OpenOffice, FireFox, and Chrome are some examples of cross-platform applications and most are not small applications most I would say are much larger than a game. So to me the argument that its too much work to port a game is a little unfounded and points more to a lack of desire to port. Though I do know I didn't mention any games as cross-platform so that could take away from my argument a little.

oh, the one game I know was ported to multiple systems is Uplink, there that's one

I personally believe it to be a big joke when people talk of fragmentation in Linux. There are prime time applications that are ported to all main operating systems, why couldn't games be easily ported? I mean mySQL, Apache, OpenOffice, FireFox, and Chrome are some examples of cross-platform applications and post are not small applications most I would say are much larger than a game.

All of the programs you listed have source available though, and as such can trivially be patched to deal with the idiosyncrasies of linux distro #5,297,384. This isn't the case for a closed source game.

oh, the one game I know was ported to multiple systems is Uplink, there that's one

Another game was Machinarium. But that was written in Flash, so obviously it could be ported easily to multiple platforms. The main problem is that developers have to re-write their API calls and to do so would require thousands of dollars of testing and debugging that they just can't justify spending.

One of the main reasons Mac ports of games are slow to come is because most Windows games use DirectX, which is completely incompatible with OpenGL.

I personally believe it to be a big joke when people talk of fragmentation in Linux. There are prime time applications that are ported to all main operating systems, why couldn't games be easily ported? I mean mySQL, Apache, OpenOffice, FireFox, and Chrome are some examples of cross-platform applications and post are not small applications most I would say are much larger than a game.

All of the programs you listed have source available though, and as such can trivially be patched to deal with the idiosyncrasies of linux distro #5,297,384. This isn't the case for a closed source game.

Yes but the point comes down to how much code is written system specific. I believe not as much code is system specific as most people think.

And not to mention the complexity of their code should make up for the fact that games are closed source.

I personally believe it to be a big joke when people talk of fragmentation in Linux. There are prime time applications that are ported to all main operating systems, why couldn't games be easily ported? I mean mySQL, Apache, OpenOffice, FireFox, and Chrome are some examples of cross-platform applications and post are not small applications most I would say are much larger than a game.

All of the programs you listed have source available though, and as such can trivially be patched to deal with the idiosyncrasies of linux distro #5,297,384. This isn't the case for a closed source game.

you mean such as all the games provided in the humble indie bundle? that's about 4 or 5 closed source games. world of goo in particular installed, runs and integrates wonderfully, looks and sounds great. What about flash, it has sound, runs video etc and is cross-platform, and oh, closed too.

Yes but the point comes down to how much code is written system specific. I believe not as much code is system specific as most people think.

And not to mention the complexity of their code should make up for the fact that games are closed source.

Yes and no. The adjustments may be relatively minor (or not, considering how distros may use completely different audio subsystems, etc.), but if you're a company releasing the product for money, that means you're going to have to do a full regression test on every single one of them to make sure those subtle distro-related changes didn't break anything on every distro you're planning to actually support. Most of the software you listed earlier doesn't really use anything beyond the base POSIX APIs anyhow so nastier issues like audio stack, 3D drivers, etc. aren't a concern. Also, those are generally only supported on a handful of big-name distros, so most of the other smaller ones are handled by the people who patched them (or the more typical "fix it yourself"), so it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison.

Yes and no. The adjustments may be relatively minor (or not, considering how distros may use completely different audio subsystems, etc.), but if you're a company releasing the product for money, that means you're going to have to do a full regression test on every single one of them to make sure those subtle distro-related changes didn't break anything on every distro you're planning to actually support. Most of the software you listed earlier doesn't really use anything beyond the base POSIX APIs anyhow so nastier issues like audio stack, 3D drivers, etc. aren't a concern. Also, those are generally only supported on a handful of big-name distros, so most of the other smaller ones are handled by the people who patched them (or the more typical "fix it yourself"), so it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison.

I am still inclined to say that you can just as easily have the installation script test for dependencies and if need be notify the user at the very least. However, if you're steam you could build a subsystem to handle the dependencies so developers have a standard API that they know will be there or could be there.

I don't have numbers for this, but it is clear (to me) that there are more than a few gamers who would love to game on linux. You know, the ones who only keep their windows partition around for their games.

The catch-22 of "no investment in the linux platform because it's not popular because no one invests in the linux platform because it's not popular because" should be addressed by those who already stand to profit by increased linux adoption. Codeweavers (Crossover Games) comes to mind. They would need to get some serious proof-of-concept and solid market research into projected adoption rates. Then they could approach Valve about helping them port to debian distros for a share of the profits, and this would be a slam dunk. Once the snowball gets rolling, it could... well, I'll leave my pie-in-the-sky dreaming for later. I'm no expert, but those who stand to profit from this should get in bed together and make a linux-gaming baby!

It seems quite possible to me that they produced an internal Linux version in order to facilitate the Mac port. Consider that porting from Windows to Mac generally breaks down into two parts: porting the non-GUI parts of your code, and writing a new Mac GUI on top of that.

The non-GUI parts of Mac and Linux are similar enough that going from one to the other is fairly easy. By doing a Linux version internally first they can have developers working on the port of the non-GUI code from Windows to Unix-like systems without having to get Macs for those developers. They can dual-boot Linux or run Linux in a virtual machine. They only need to initially buy Macs for the developers working on the Mac GUI.

Same goes for testing. The non-GUI portions of the port can be tested on Linux first, without having to buy a bunch of Macs for the testers. They then only need a relatively small number of Macs for testing of the complete product.

It's also worth noting that a big chunk of Linux desktop installations are probably never going to be used for gaming (netbooks that don't have sufficient hardware capabilities, university computer labs, free software enthusiasts who are ideologically disinclined to purchase proprietary software).

It seems quite possible to me that they produced an internal Linux version in order to facilitate the Mac port. Consider that porting from Windows to Mac generally breaks down into two parts: porting the non-GUI parts of your code, and writing a new Mac GUI on top of that.

The non-GUI parts of Mac and Linux are similar enough that going from one to the other is fairly easy. By doing a Linux version internally first they can have developers working on the port of the non-GUI code from Windows to Unix-like systems without having to get Macs for those developers. They can dual-boot Linux or run Linux in a virtual machine. They only need to initially buy Macs for the developers working on the Mac GUI.

Same goes for testing. The non-GUI portions of the port can be tested on Linux first, without having to buy a bunch of Macs for the testers. They then only need a relatively small number of Macs for testing of the complete product.

Valve's dedicated servers currently only run on two platforms: Windows and Linux. So, to an extent, part of any Valve multiplayer games already runs on Linux without the GUI... but as far as I'm aware, not Mac.

I'm working on my first indie game under Linux, but we're releasing it for Windows, then maybe OSX. Linux is a low priority, more so after this latest news. We want to finish the game and get it into players' hands, and that may never happen if we insist on Linux support. It's doable but it's a lot of work for a relatively few players who probably have Windows boxes for gaming anyway. Most likely we'll open-source the game after we make some money (or not :-) and let anyone who cares about Linux support figure it out for themselves.

Too many distributions with different package managers and libraries? Yes, but there's a simple solution for that: statically link everything you can.

Audio? Yeah, that's a huge pain under Linux... I think you have to support ALSA and PulseAudio at a minimum. I wasn't satisfied with any of the open-source cross-platform libraries, and I have a hard time believing that the close-source libs can do any better with this mess. Audio is not pretty under Windows either, BTW -- they have DirectSound, WASAPI, and XAudio 2 now. There's no such thing as a good OS.

So to me the argument that its too much work to port a game is a little unfounded and points more to a lack of desire to port.

Actually, to me it points to the fact that most Linux users are diametrically and ideologically oposed to paying for anything, much less games.

Your point about Linux users is a bit insulting. It assumes that if it cost money no one would use it. I don't believe that to be the case, at least that is not why I use it. I currently have free copies of xp, Vista, and Windows 7 but prefer to use my Linux platform. I just thinly of it's ported to OSX it can be ported to Linux.

Given that Steam and all the major Steam games (Half Life 2, TF2, Torchlight, Plants vs Zombies etc.) all work just fine under Linux using Wine, what exactly would be the point of spending time making a native Linux client?

Steam "just works" with Linux+Wine already. I'm happy that Valve spends its free time making stuff like Alien Swarm instead of fixing problems which are already solved.

Now what *would* be useful is if Valve would publicise the existing high compatibility of Linux+Wine with their products. One FAQ plus one howto, job done.

Your point about Linux users is a bit insulting. It assumes that if it cost money no one would use it. I don't believe that to be the case, at least that is not why I use it. I currently have free copies of xp, Vista, and Windows 7 but prefer to use my Linux platform. I just thinly of it's ported to OSX it can be ported to Linux.

I don't think anyone questioned whether Steam could be ported to Linux or not since it has always been possible. The reason it hasn't (or won't right now) is due to them not seeing why they should.

Those applications, Apache, MySQL are not comparable to modern games, and much much smaller. Even if Linux had the same amount of users as OSX I think the answer would have been the same. The video drivers for Linux are terrible, no matter which vendor. Sure one may be better than another, but they still are awful even with the improvements that have been made over the years. Audio is not much better either. I only use one OS at work which is Linux, and it has it's uses and does the job very well as a server... the desktop has some ways to go yet before bigger titles start coming out for it.